CUSHMAN KELLOGG DAVIS
I reprint here a paper read before the American Antiquarian
Society shortly after Mr. Davis's death.
Cushman Kellogg Davis was born at Henderson, Jefferson County,
New York, June 16, 1838, and died at St. Paul, Minnesota,
November 27, 1900. On his mother's side he was descended
from Robert Cushman and Mary Allerton, the last survivor of
the company which came over in the Mayflower. He was graduated
at the University of Michigan in 1857, and admitted to the
Bar shortly before the breaking out of the Civil War. He
enlisted at the beginning of the War and served as First Lieutenant
of Company B, Eighth Wisconsin Regiment, until 1864, when
he was compelled by physical infirmity to resign his commission.
He was an excellent soldier. He sustained an injury to one
of his eyes, which caused him much pain through life, until
a few years before his death he lost the sight of that eye
altogether.
After his return from the war, he began the practice of the
law anew, in which he gained great distinction. For many
years, and until his death, he was the acknowledged leader
of the Bar of his State. He was a member of the State Legislature
of Minnesota in 1867, United States District Attorney from
1868 till 1873, and Governor of the State in 1874 and 1875.
He was one of the Regents of the State University of Minnesota
from 1892 to 1898. In 1887 he was elected United States Senator,
and reelected in 1893 and 1899. He held the office of Senator
until his death. He was Chairman of the Committee on Foreign
Relations from March, 1897, till his death. He was one of
the Commissioners who negotiated the Treaty of Paris with
Spain.
He was a great lover of books, of which he had a costly collection.
He knew Shakespeare very thoroughly, and was the author of
a book called "The Law of Shakespeare."
He was also a zealous and thorough student of the career
of Napoleon, whose civic and military career he greatly admired.
His mind was a marvellous storehouse of literary gems which
were unknown to most scholars, but rewarded his diligent search
and loving study of his books.
Many good stories are told by his companions of the Bar and
in public life of his apt quotations. It is said that he
once defended a Judge in an impeachment case. The point involved
was the power of the court to punish for contempt, and Davis
quoted in support of his position the splendid and well-known
lines of Henry the Fourth, in the famous scene where the Chief
Justice punishes the Prince of Wales for contempt of the judicial
office and authority. For this anecdote, the writer is indebted
to Senator Lodge. In the Senate, during the Hawaiian debate,
he quoted this passage from Juvenal:
Sed quo cecidit sub crimine; quisnam
Delator? quibus judiciis; quo teste probavit?
Nil horum; verbosa et grandis epistola venit
A Capreis. Bene habet; nul plus interrogo.
He then proceeded:
"My friend from Massachusetts (Mr. Hoar) requests me to translate
that. He does not need it, of course. But another Senator
(Mr. Washburn) suggests that some of the rest of us do. I
will not attempt to give a literal translation, but I will
give an accurate paraphrase, which will show its application.
'Into what crime has he fallen? By what informer has he been
accused? What judge has passed upon him? What witness has
testified against him? Not one or any of these. A verbose
and turgid message has come over from Capri. That settles
it. I will interrogate no further.'"
The most ardent admirers of the then President, Mr. Cleveland,
could not help joining in the laugh.
Mr. Davis took great delight in his descent from the early
settlers of Plymouth, and valued exceedingly the good will
of the people of Massachusetts. The members of the Society
who were fortunate enough to meet him will not forget their
delight in his pleasant companionship, when he visited Massachusetts
a few years ago to attend our meeting and contribute a paper
to our Proceedings. He had hoped to repeat the visit.
I prefer, instead of undertaking to complete this imperfect
sketch by a new portraiture of my honored friend, to add what
I said in the Senate, when the loss of Mr. Davis was still
recent:--
"Mr. President: There is no Senator who would not be glad
to lay a wreath of honor and affection on the monument of
Cushman K. Davis. That, however, is more especially the right
of his colleague and his successor and the members of the
great Committee where he won so much of his fame. I ought
to say but a few words.
"The Senate, as its name implies, has been from the beginning,
with few exceptions, an assembly of old men. In the course
of nature many of its members die in office. That has been
true of thirty-eight Senators since I came to the Capitol.
Others, a yet larger number, die soon after they leave office.
Of the men with whom I have served in this Chamber fifty-
eight more are now dead, making in all ninety-six, enough
and to spare to organize another Senate elsewhere. To that
number has been added every Vice-President but two. Upon
those who have died in office eulogies have been pronounced
in this Chamber and in the House. The speakers have obeyed
the rule demanded by the decencies of funeral occasions--nil
de mortuis nisi bonum--if not the command born of a tenderer
pity for human frailty--jam parce sepulto. But in general,
with scarcely and exception, the portraitures have been true
and faithful. They prove that the people of the American
States, speaking through their legislative assemblies, are
not likely to select men to represent them in this august
assembly who are lacking in high qualities either of intellect
or of character. However that may be, it is surely true of
Mr. Davis that whatever has been or will be said of him to-
day, or was said of him when the news of his death first shocked
the country, is just what would have been said when he was
alive by any man who knew him. I have served with him here
nearly fourteen years. I have agreed with him and I have
differed from him in regard to matters of great pith and moment
which deeply stirred the feelings of the people, as they did
mine, and doubtless did his own. I never heard any man speak
of him but with respect and kindness.
"Of course, Mr. President, in this great century which is
just over, when our Republic--this infant Hercules--has been
growing from its cradle to its still youthful manhood, the
greatest place for a live man has been that of a soldier
in time of war and that of a statesman in time of peace.
Cushman K. Davis was both. He did a man's full duty in both.
No man values more than I do the function of the man of letters.
No man reveres more than I do the man of genius who in a loving
and reverent way writes the history of a great people, or
the poet from whose lyre comes the inspiration which induces
heroic action in war and peace. But I do not admit that the
title of the historian or that of the poet to the gratitude
and affection of mankind is greater than that of the soldier
who saves nations, or that of the statesman who creates or
preserves them, or who makes them great. I have no patience
when I read that famous speech of Gladstone, he and Tennyson
being together on a journey, when he modestly puts Mr. Tennyson's
title to the gratitude of mankind far above his own. Gladstone,
then Prime Minister, declared that Tennyson would be remembered
long after he was forgotten. That may be true. But whether
a man be remembered or whether he be forgotten; whether his
work be appreciated or no; whether his work be known or unknown
at the time it is accomplished, is not the test of its greatness
or its value to mankind. The man who keeps this moral being,
or helps to keep this moral being we call a State in the paths
of justice and righteousness and happiness, the direct effect
of whose action is felt in the comfort and happiness and moral
life of millions upon millions of human lives, who opens and
constructs great highways of commerce, who makes schools and
universities not only possible but plenty, who brings to pass
great policies that allure men from misery, and poverty, and
oppression, and serfdom in one world, to free, contented,
happy, prosperous homes in another, is a great benefactor
to mankind, whether his work be accomplished with sounding
of trumpets, or stamping of feet, or clapping of hands, or
the roar and tumult of popular applause, or whether it be
done in the silence of some committee room, and no man know
it but by its results.
"I am not ready to admit that even Shakespeare worked on a
higher plane, or was a greater power on earth, than King Alfred
or George Washington, even if it be that he will survive them
both in the memory of man. The name of every man but one
who fought with Leonidas at Thermopylae is forgotten. But
is AEschylus greater than Leonidas, or Miltiades, or Themistocles?
The literature of Athens preserves to immortality the fame
of its great authors. But it was Solon, and Pericles, and
Miltiades that created and saved and made great the city,
without which the poets could not have existed. Mr. Tennyson
himself came nearer the truth than his friend, Mr. Gladstone,
when he said:
He
That, through the channels of the state,
Conveys the people's wish, is great;
His name is pure; his fame is free.
"There have been soldiers whose courage saved the day in great
decisive battles when the fate of nations hung in the scale,
yet whose most enduring monument was the column of smoke which
rose when their death shot was fired. There have been statesmen
whose silent influence has decided the issue when the country
was at the parting of the ways, of whose service history takes
no heed. The great Ohio Territory, now six imperial States,
was twice saved to freedom by the almost unnoticed action
of a single man. With all respect for the man of letters,
we are not yet quite ready to admit that the trumpeter is
better than the soldier, or the painter greater than the lion.
"There is no need of many words to sum up the life and character
of Cushman Davis. His life was in the daylight. Minnesota
knew him. His country knew him and loved him. He was a good
soldier in his youth, and a great Senator in his maturer manhood.
What can be said more, or what can be said better, to sum
up the life of an American citizen? He offered his life for
his country when life was all before him. His State and his
country rewarded him with their highest honor. The great
orator and philosopher of Rome declared in his youth, and
repeated in his age, that death could not come prematurely
to a man who had been Consul. This man surely might be accounted
ready to die. He had discharged honorably life's highest
duty, and his cup of honor and of glory was full.
"We are thinking to-day of something more than a public sorrow.
We are mourning the loss of a close and delightful companionship,
a companionship which lightened public care and gave infinite
pleasure to private intercourse. If he had never held office,
if his name had never been heard even beyond the boundaries
of a single municipality, he would have been almost anywhere
a favorite and foremost citizen. He was, in the first place,
always a gentleman; and a true gentleman always gives tone
to any company in which he is found, whether it be among the
rulers of States or the humblest gathering of friendly neighbors.
Lord Erskine said on a great occasion:
"'It is impossible to define in terms the proper feelings
of a gentleman; but their existence has supported this country
for many ages, and she might perish if they were lost,'
"Certainly our friend had this quality. He was everywhere
a gentleman. He met every occasion in life with a simple
and quiet courtesy. There was not much of deference in it.
There was no yielding or supplication or timidity in it. I
do not think he ever asked favors, though no man was more
willing to grant them. But there is something more than this
in the temper of which I am speaking. The man who possesses
it gives unconsciously to himself or his associates tone to
every circle, as I just said, in which he is found. So, wherever
he was, his manner or behavior prevailed, whatever might have
happened to the same men if they had been left alone.
"Senator Davis was a man who kept well his own counsel. He
was a man to whom it was safe for other men to trust their
counsel. His conversation, to which it was always a delight
to listen, had no gossip in it. Still less had it ever anything
of ill nature or sarcasm. He liked to share with a friend
the pleasure he took in finding some flower or gem of literature
which, for long ages till he found it in some out-of-the-
way nook, had--
Blushed unseen,
And wasted its sweetness on the desert air.
"He had what Jeremy Taylor calls, 'the great endearment of
prudent and temperate speech.'
"His conversation was sparkling and witty and full of variety,
but no spark from him was ever a cinder in the eye of his
friend.
"He had a learning rare among public men, and, for its variety,
rare, I think, among scholars. He would bring out bits of
history, full of interest and instruction, from the most obscure
sources, in common conversation. He was an excellent Latin
scholar. He had read and mastered Tacitus, and a man who
has mastered Tacitus has had the best gymnastic training of
the intellect, both in vigor and style, which the resources
of all literature can supply.
"One secret of his great popularity with his companions here--
a popularity I think unexcelled, indeed, I incline to think
unequalled by that of any other man with whom I have served--
is that to which the late Justin Morrill owed so much. He
never debated. He rarely answered other men's arguments,
never with warmth or heat. But he was exceedingly tenacious
of his own opinion. He was, in the things he stood for, as
unyielding as flint and true as steel. But his flint or steel
never struck out a spark by collision with any other. He
spoke very rarely in debate in general; only when his official
place on his committee, or something which concerned his own
constituents especially, made speaking absolutely imperative.
Then he gave his opinion as a judge gives it, or as a delegate
to some great international council might be supposed to give
it; responsible for it himself, but undertaking no responsibility
for other men's opinion or conduct; never assuming that it
was his duty or within his power to convert, or change, or
instruct them, still less to chastise them. Whether that
way be the best way for usefulness in a deliberative body,
especially in a legislative body of a great popular government,
I will not undertake now to say. Certainly it is not the
common way here or elsewhere. It is very rare indeed, that
any man possessing the great literary and oratorical power
of Mr. Davis, especially a man to whom nobody ever thought
of imputing timidity or undue desire to enjoy public favor,
or want of absolute confidence in his own opinions, will be
found to refrain from employing these qualities to persuade
or convince other men.
"He had a rare and exquisite gift which, if he had been a
man of letters and not a man engaged in a strenuous public
life, would have brought him great fame. Once in a while
he said something in private, and more rarely, though once
or twice, in a public speech, which reminded you of the delicate
touch of Hawthorne. His likening President Cleveland and
Mr. Blount, looking upon the late royalty of the Sandwich
Island with so much seriousness, to Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza taking in great earnest the spectacle of a theatrical
representation at a country fair and eager to rescue the distressed
damsel, was one of the most exquisite felicities of the literature
of the Senate.
"He had great pride in his ancestry, and was a great lover
of the history of New England and Plymouth, from which they
came, though he never gave himself airs on account of it.
He was a descendant of Robert Cushman, the preacher of the
Pilgrims, whose service was in a thousand ways of such value
to the little colony at Plymouth. Yet it had never happened
to him to visit the scenes with which the feet of his ancestors
had been so familiar, until a few years ago he did me the
honor to be my guest in Massachusetts, and spent a few days
in visiting her historic places. He gazed upon Boston and
Plymouth and Concord reverently as ever Moslem gazed upon
Mecca or the feet of palmer stood by the holy sepulchre. That
week to him was crowded with a delight with which few other
hours in his life could compare. I had hoped that it might
be my fortune and his that he might visit Massachusetts again,
that her people might gather in their cities to do him honor,
and might learn to know him better, and might listen to the
sincere eloquence of his voice. But it was ordered otherwise.
"There are other things his country had hoped for him. She
had hoped a longer and higher service, perhaps the highest
service of all. But the fatal and inexorable shaft has stricken
him down in the full vigor of a yet strenuous manhood. The
great transactions in which he had borne so large a part still
remain incomplete and their event is still uncertain.
"There is a painting which a great Italian master left unfinished.
The work was taken up and completed by a disciple. The finished
picture bears this inscription: 'What Titian left unfinished,
Palma reverently completed, and dedicated to God.' So may
our beloved Republic find always, when one servant leaves
his work unfinished, another who will take it up and dedicate
it to the country and to God."